Ice breaker

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Ruh-spect! Talk to the man and you will know that's what it's
about. Never mind the gangsta rap, the scowl you always get when
Detective Fin slides into view, or that hip-hop rhyme on street
crime, bad cops, pimps, their ho's, and the stuff with which he
outrages feminists around the world and sends a thrilled shudder
and a spin though American television's conservative
commentators.

Trouble is, what do you call him? Mr T? Mr Ice? How about Tracy
or Mr Marrow, as in Tracy Marrow, the name he was given at birth in
New Jersey in 1958? "A real boy-named-Sue situation," he has said.
"I learned to fight real quick."

Ice-T quickly sorts out the formalities. Between rehearsals for
Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, brushing aside the
interruptions from gofers, he is instant charm. Lines well learnt.
"G'day Brian, it's Ice . . . howya doin? It's eight at night
Thursday. What can I tell ya?"

Where do we begin? Ice, who became known as the father of
gangsta music, lost both parents by the time he was 12 and was sent
to live with an aunt in Los Angeles. It was no easy 'hood but he
adapted. At high school he gained his nickname from an enthusiasm
for the work of Iceberg Slim, a former LA pimp and cult ghetto
poet. After two years in the army he turned to low-level hustling,
gang life, pimping and trying to keep away from the law. It was a
hellraiser's existence, given pause only when his Porsche 914 was
ripped apart in a car accident in 1986.

"I thought I'd died," he says. "I was in the hospital for 10
weeks immobilised. I didn't have anybody come into the hospital; I
didn't really have people that loved me. I was kinda like an
outlaw, you know, in the streets, causing trouble.

"Sometimes when you come really close to death, you say to
yourself, 'Wow, that would've been my whole life, right there'.
And, man, I knew I didn't want my life to end like that. I started
making changes. Sometimes you need to stop, you need to really get
a chance, get a grasp of what's going on. But when you're moving
really fast, you almost can't see yourself."

As those he knew either disappeared into prisons or were killed,
Ice-T found new talents. His gritty, articulate rhymes and music
shot him to hip-hop stardom by the late 1980s. It was his song
Cop Killer, recorded with his rap-metal group Body Count
in the early '90s, that gained him notoriety, a feud with LA police
chief Daryl Gates and the angry disapproval of actor Charlton
Heston and president George Bush. But through music, writing and a
cool natural talent as an actor, he has proved a more than
successful survivor.

Ironically, he has probably reached his biggest audience as
Law & Order: SVU detective Odafin "Fin" Tutuola, an
unlikely role for which he has shown unexpected subtleties.

"When I first got on the show, I don't know what the writers
were thinking," he says. "I mean, they came, they named me Otis,
then Tutuola. They had me in suits. My background was supposed to
be some type of guy that went to law school but never took the bar,
whose parents were black . . . I mean, I think they just
overthought it."

The younger audience the producers were hoping to attract
already knew how Ice-T felt about cops and it didn't need much
adjustment. "So it was, 'Ice, show us how to play a cop . . . if
you don't like us, show 'em how to do it right'. And that's
basically what I did. I just kind of took the character and just
started putting myself into the lines and people started to dig
it."

Was the welcome mat out for him on the set?

"I was kinda nervous because the show had been on a year," he
says. "I came in for the last episode of the first season. It was
crazy. I mean everybody was cool. It's kinda like getting on to a
moving train, you know, you're with a group of people that have
been together a year and here you come."

It seems he clicked immediately with (co-star) Richard Belzer,
the actor who has played mildly eccentric detective John Munch for
seven years, a winner since his days of Homicide. Ice-T
felt the fact they were both nightclub entertainers, that Belzer
was a controversial Jewish comic and he was a controversial black
singer, helped them connect.

"Belzer is a really nice guy. He's a very nice guy. I mean,
let's be honest, neither of us are actors by trade, so I think us
knowing that we're coming from another place, we both kinda help
each other and we grow."

It's intriguing to wonder how playing the cop has changed the
man the LAPD once saw as a demonic icon. He is now 47, father of
two and, no matter what is sung, recorded or said, a very rich,
enormously successful performer, the image of much the 'hood would
have resented. "Has it changed my attitude about police at all?" he
responds. "I'd say, yeah. I have a respect for, you know, the
heaviness of the job, especially for the people that work in this
type of a unit, or homicide, who've got to go through it day and
night and then go home to the kids. But then I also still have my
same views about police . . . that this is an honourable job and
when you step out of line you become an arch criminal because
people are entrusting their lives to you."

Ice-T does have respect for the writers of Law & Order:
SUV, the fact they are such sticklers for detail, from the
street jargon to police and medical terms. "Sometimes I'll be
reading scripts, and I'm like, 'This really happened?' And they'll
go, 'Yeah', and then tell you where it happened. It's crazy out
there."

And has it changed his message to the audience?

"I try to motivate people by myself; I mean, that's all I can
really do," he says. "What I try to do is say, 'I'm from there, I
should be in a holding-tank somewhere, I made about as many
mistakes as you possibly could make, I still got an attitude, but I
still managed to make it, I'm doing good and maybe you can learn
from that.' Because kids need role models.

"In the end, though, it's the music that keeps me sane, you
know. I do this for a job, but the music is my real expression.
That's my canvas . . . where I still paint my art."

Law & Order: SVU screens on Wednesdays at 9.30pm on
Channel Ten. Ice-T is performing in Melbourne next week.